THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 1, 1996 TAG: 9602030290
SECTION: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN TODAYPAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Special section
SOURCE: BY CHARLISE LYLES
LENGTH: Long : 155 lines
On a recent Tuesday, scores of students filed out of professor Granville M. Sawyer Jr.'s entrepreneurship lecture with visions of black enterprise building in their heads.
``I think I'm going to start an accounting firm,'' said LeTesha Freeman, a junior accounting major.
`Hmmmmm,'' said Vivian Everett, a senior number-crunching major. ``My husband has a carpeting business that I want to enhance.
``But,'' she said, squinting her eyes at the future, ``Day care is it! Where I work, I'm finding out people need child care at night and on weekends.''
For the past hour and a half they've listened to the Norfolk State University professor's real-life business anecdotes from Michael Milken's fall to entrepreneurial ethics, delivered in his cool, Jesse Jackson-style corporate poetry.
One minute it's: ``Plan your work. And work your plan.''
The next: ``How about a seminar-promotion business? They say talk is cheap. But that's not really true. Talk is lucrative. Les Brown knows.''
``He is very motivating,'' says Freeman, hugging her textbooks. ``He's even talked about starting a business in Africa.''
As director of NSU's Department of Entrepreneurial Studies, Sawyer does not necessarily want his students to find a job when they graduate. He's raising a new generation of black entrepreneurs.
``Most kids come to college with the idea of graduating and getting a job,'' says Sawyer. ``But I want them to think in terms of making jobs instead of taking jobs.''
A solid history of black entrepreneurship, though little known or celebrated, drives Sawyer's ambitions.
The free market is a freedom that African Americans have managed to take advantage of even before emancipation. According to historical accounts of blacks in business, some slaves - when not on master's field clock - were permitted to earn money by leasing their labor or crafting goods to sell.
In Colonial Virginia, Samuel Johnson, a Jamestown land owner, was one of the the first African-American entrepreneurs. In Revolutionary-era Chicago, Jean Baptist Du Sable built a national reputation as a merchant and wholesaler.
Up North, through the Civil War and into the 20th century, blacks built businesses as hairdressers, blacksmiths, tailors, dyers, glass and papermakers - all from ingenuity forged in sweat.
In Philadelphia, James Forster owned a sail-manufacturing firm that employed 40 people. And waiter Robert Boyle was credited with the first catering service.
Still, the confines of slavery, status as half men or fear of being identified as a runaway limited enterprise. Later, ``separate but equal'' court doctrine stymied efforts for decades.
In the early 1900s through the 1940s, Durham, N.C. was a major center of black trade. It included a black-owned textile mill that hired white salesman, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and Smith's Fish Market, which boast annual receipts of $90,000. In Norfolk, black businesses such as the Plaza Hotel flourished all along Church Street.
Though deeply welcomed, desegregation upset some black businesses as money poured into hotels, restaurants and other establishments that once forbade blacks to enter.
The civil rights movement won government assistance for black entrepreneurs with the Small Business Administration's section 8(a) program for minority contractors.
But in recent years, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court has ruled such programs unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1989, the court's landmark ruling in City of Richmond vs. Croson struck down an ordinance requiring that 30 percent of each public-building contract be set aside for minority businesses.
Enter Sawyer and a new cadre of blacks throughout the country committed to commerce.
Sawyer wants graduates to cash in on technological and professional service opportunities in the 21st century.
``What we want the kids to have when they leave is a merchant's mentality,'' says Sawyer. ``I don't want students to go into business as soon as they leave here. But I want them to be thinking about that, to have the skills and knowledge to do it.''
To earn a diploma, students must develop a business plan ``so they have a sound idea that they can build on.''
The plan must be developed to a competitive level. Each year, at the program's annual expo, student teams present the plans for evaluation by local business people and bankers.
Last year, plans for a hotel and restaurant, a retail and a service firm received high marks from a panel made up of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Coleman Foundation, a Chicago-based entrepreneurial research institute.
Under Sawyer's tutelage, ``these students stood up and presented very polished ideas based on thorough research,'' says Wanda Lester, who works with Sawyer as director of NSU's Institute of Entrepreneurship.
Through the institute, students gain hands-on experience working on technical assistance teams to local businesses. And Sawyer has worked one-on-one with local business folk pursuing projects from custom-gift baskets to a carpet cleaning services.
Sawyer really does encourage his students to find jobs, but with a very specific purpose, training for their own gig.
``They need to be successful `entrepreneurs' - individuals within corporations who have responsibility for business units,'' says Sawyer. ``For instance, as a division manager within a corporation, you learn to run that division like a business.''
Follow this formula and you'll be ready to manage marketing and businesses services firms for lawyers and doctors too busy to promote themselves. Sawyer sees service firms for baby boomers who are too busy to handle their own affairs as a growth industry.
Demands, he says, for health-care services will also pick up as boomers age and the aging population increases.
``Somebody has got to take care of us, and whoever does is going to make a lot of money,'' says Sawyer. ``Remember, one of the most affluent demographic groups is people over 55.''
Nobody planted such notions in Sawyer's head.
The son of academics, his father a retired president of Texas Southern University in Houston, his mom a retired English teacher, Sawyer earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Tennessee.
As a co-op student, he spent every other semester at General Motors in Detroit - or ``Day-TOI,'' as he calls it. From there, he took a Motor City swagger in his step and tone and a love of Aretha Franklin. But none for engineering. ``Watching them was boring.''
He went to work anyway for Chevron in California.
``I was talking to my father on the phone and I told him, `By the way,' some guy from a school named Carnegie-Mellon called here trying to recruit graduate students for business,'' Sawyer recalls.
``My father's tone changed completely. He asked me if I'd call him back. I told him no. That is the only time in my entire adult life that my father ever told me what to do. He said, `You call him back and tell him you're going.' ''
Sawyer earned his MBA and went to work for Gulf Oil Corp. in Houston as a financial analyst and from there to senior financial analyst at International Paper Co. in New York City.
Then along came a doctoral recruiter from the University of Tennessee. As part of the program, Sawyer had to teach.
I had never taught a class in my life,'' he says. ``They gave me an instructor's manual and pointed me toward the door. I walked into that class in 1980, and by the end of that 50 minutes, I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
``This is me.''
In 1985, when he received his degree in corporate finance, he was one of only a handful of blacks in the country with doctoral degrees in corporate finance.
He's eager to guide others to business careers, academic or commercial - whichever makes them happy.
``The one caveat I'd put on any business plan,'' says Sawyer, ``is that the most important ingredient for success is doing something that you enjoy.''
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Granville M. Sawyer Jr., of NSU's Dept. of Entrepreneurial Studies.
KEYWORDS: SPECIAL SECTION SUPPLEMENT AFRICAN-AMERICAN
HISTORY BLACK HISTORY
by CNB